Monthly Archives: February 2007

Cluttons 3 of 3

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Following on from items Cluttons 1 and 2, I write this because it highlights the differences between business in the late Victorian era, my time there, and today

Aspirations outstripped resources, and I had ideas beyond my station, like going to the theatre. In London, at lunch time I would rent a folding seat, at the entrance to the theatre ‘Gods’, to reserve a place in the queue for the evening. In The evening I claimed and sat on it, being amused by the buskers until the seats were collected. This all cost – economies were made. I discovered the Express Dairy in Victoria Street. Lunches then consisted of a small current loaf, cut through the middle and buttered. This I ate in the Embankment gardens or St James’s Park, swapping a roast with two veg and a sweet, for an evening in the Gods at one of the City’s theatres.

My next posting in Cluttons was to the Rent Department and a certain Miss Veezey, a charming if slightly tentative young woman, not happy with being brought face to face with the seamier side of life. The Management had decided I was a more robust specimen. I was called into the Secretary’s sanctum, proof enough that I was either to be honoured or dressed down. Headmasters Studies had taught me I was unlikely to be honoured. I went with my tail between my legs. “Ah! Riggs!” No suggestion of sitting down. – a bad sign! “Do you possess a hat, Riggs?” “No. Sir.” I said mystified. “You will understand that this Firm has a long tradition. It is not long since all the staff were required to wear frock-coats and top hats,” he said with equanimity, and not a smile. I just nodded, aghast at what might be coming next, my mind distracted with the vision of tens of my colleagues going in and out of the office in stove-pipe hats and frock coats. He continued. “To represent us you will need a hat. If you can’t wear it you must carry it, and never go anywhere on business without it.” Class dismissed. As I went back to my new department and desk I thought it a bit rich, making me buy a hat, when I was paid only a pound a week, less deductions. I consoled myself that I was lucky; my predecessors had had to pay in hundreds for their tutelage, They, probably had to buy a frock-coat and a topper to go with it. I duly purchased what was then the height of fashion for the young office worker – a Porkpie Hat,.

Rent collecting was really a juggling act, especially in the rain. There was the rent book with hard cover and all the names and payments carefully recorded, held by a thick red rubber band. Then there was the cash pouch under the jacket, the inevitable hat, the pencil, the householder’s rent book and last, the rent itself, with only one pair of hands. The routine was to stick the hat between the knees, take the money, hand back the change, mark up the book, mark up the householder’s book, say a nice thank you, put the rent book under the arm and retrieve the hat. Easy? Try it with an umbrella as well. Miss Veezey was no fool. Of course that was only the basics with the silent minority, there were always the garrulous ones who were difficult to leave politely, withholding the book and cash until they had told all. Short of wrestling I was a captive audience. I needed training by a milk rounds-man. There were the flats – climbing uncarpeted stairs which children had dampened when the need arose and the atmosphere was thick, or some elderly, undernourished, bodiless hand with a greasy, brown paper covered rent book with equally mucky money would appear through the four inch slit between door and jamb. That particular house was the last straw with respect to Miss Veezey.

Once I had shown myself capable of collecting rent I was transferred upstairs to the Holy of Holies, the Surveyor’s Department. There they spoke a different language, had more freedom of movement. Instead of writing draft letters for correction, like school, we dictated our own letters, rather than having to write them out in long hand and have them corrected, like essay-time at school. The dictating machines recorded mechanically onto a rotating tube of a black shellac-type material, and the playback needle was of bamboo. When the typist had typed the letters she would engage a shaving device which scraped a thin shaving ready for the next offering. I’m amazed how far we have come in so short a time, to voice recognition transference, dictated straight onto paper, a system I now use.

My main job then was to take a taxi each morning and visit the areas of our property damaged since my last visit and make superficial estimates of percentage damage, both structural and cosmetic, to enable the registration of War Damage claims. Sometimes, when the raids increased and occurred in daylight as well as at night, I could actually be out recording when further damage arose. The day came when I received my papers and was about to head off to the Navy. On that day I departed, I left a huge ‘Property Vacant, This Space For Sale’ standard notice with a little poem I have long since forgotten.

Shorts N0 1

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Not An Electric Eel In the Belfast shipyard of Harland and Wolf, it was necessary for me to go into the bowels of the ships to check wiring. It was there that I discovered the cruel, if crafty, disciplinary action of the management. Generally it was a long way from any part of the ship to the conveniences ashore, and, in wartime, most of the men were on piecework which meant that every moment counted – to stop work was like drawing blood. The men therefore, tended to relieve themselves in some dark corner of the bowels of the ship which was under construction. The management had its own bizarre solution to this problem, in the same dark corner they had a string of short lengths of live, low voltage electric cable, stripped of its insulation – that tended to cure the practice.

Incendiaries I was asleep in bed when my mother woke me, telling me the house opposite had been hit by an incendiary – silver coloured tubes, probably of aluminium, about nine inches to a foot long which were dropped in bunches and scattered on their way down, bursting on impact and setting fire to anything combustible within a small radius. In this case it had gone through the scullery roof of the house opposite, and was setting fire to the laundry. The ARP issued us with a stirrup pump, really a garden spray, two buckets, one for water, one for sand, and a long handled shovel – a broom handle with a small, square mouthed coal shovel fitted – something for lifting dog excrement rather than digging . One was supposed to lift the incendiary, set it in a bucket of sand to burn itself out. The water was to put out the fires. It was a totally useless system for any conflagration greater than a smouldering cigarette – just another cosmetic exercise to hoodwink the populace.

I put on my tin hat, trousers and gum boots, I climbed on to the roof of the scullery and opened up a hole to put the stirrup hose through. The whole exercise was a total waste of time and in the end we just chucked buckets of water in .There was no point in trying to open the door into the yard, the place below was an inferno.

Fire Watching On another night, two of us were fire watching at an office when there was a shower of incendiaries and one lodged behind a stone balustrade. Too far to reach with the long shovel, I decided to slide down the roof and wedge my feet against the balustrade to tip the incendiary out through one of the holes between the columns. The idea seemed safe enough and that was what we did. It was only when we went up in daylight to see what damage had occurred that we discovered that the balustrade had one or two larger holes at intervals, holes a body could have slid through and shot down to the road some five floors below. They do say ignorance is bliss.

Knowing I was short of cash an aunt got me a job fire watching in a tea warehouse in Docklands. It was tedious, boring, but well-paid. Opposite, some distance away, was a railway viaduct and one of the arches had been equipped with heavy doors at either end to form an air raid shelter. On a night, when I was not there, the Docklands had the terrible bombing, and a bomb blew the doors up the shelter killing and injuring many, while my tea warehouse, unsurprisingly, was consumed. This was another case where ignorance at the time is bliss.

High Tea. A friend had two daughters with a four-year age difference. Sara and Denise The older daughter Sara had a boyfriend and had persuaded her parents to let her invite him to high tea. They in turn had insisted that Denise was to have tea, as a chaperone. Never in their wildest dreams did they suspect the outcome of this rash decision. They were given book and verse, and a blow by blow account of what had happened, from a deeply offended Sara, on their return.

Sara had really pushed the boat out with a fresh salmon salad and all the trimmings. That was not the problem, the problem was Denise. Apparently, Sarah had everything prepared, with the table beautifully laid and only had to bring a few things to the table after the boy and Denise were seated, but that was when strife began. How Denise thought up the ploy has always been a mystery, she was only about thirteen years old. She was fully conversant with all their condiments, utensils and cutlery, but on this occasion she chose to ignore all that and show surprise at everything on the table. ‘What’s this?’ she asked, picking up the pickle fork. ‘I didn’t know we had one of those.’ Next it was the fish forks, the pepper mill, the sweet server and so on. When we heard the story, we and their parents commiserated with Sara in absentia, but we all had to laugh at such devious thinking.

Hypnotism

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Since my Naval days I have never been remotely interested in hypnotism as entertainment. I would go so far as to say that I disapprove of the practice. When my daughters were young and we were on holiday, on more than one occasion they and Sophie went to the theatre to see a hypnotist and, while I did not openly object, I refused to go with them. I did though warn them not to go on the stage as subjects.

At Leydene, there was a theatre where films were shown in the evenings and occasionally ENSA would put on a show. Sometimes the Entertainment’s Officer would call on talent within the camp and we would have an amateur show, although to use the word amateur is unfair as many of the men and women who performed had been professionals before joining up.

One such was a hypnotist. We had first come across him on the Isle of Man where he had performed there in a similar type of concert made up of Naval and RAF talent. I attended the show and found him very competent. It was the first time I had ever seen hypnotism demonstrated and somehow even at the show I had misgivings. I disliked the idea of needles being pushed into people without their knowledge or permission, and I was always suspicious of what effect the process would have on the brain long term, I have a thing about the amount of respect which should be attendant on the brain. The hypnotist was on another course running parallel with ours and therefore several weeks after we arrived at Leydene he turned up.

By the time he arrived I was an instructor, but did not teach his class, and as he was below the rank of Petty Officer our paths never crossed, so for some time the stories I heard of him were gossip, unsubstantiated. It was said that he held court each evening in his Nissan hut and using anyone who was there, including a resident of the hut, he would practice his skills to entertain those who packed the hut to the doors. Then the rumour became rife, which worried some of us on the staff,. It was purported that there was one man the hypnotist could put under at a distance of a hundred feet, just by clapping his hands.

Leydene had been a large country house before being taken over by the Admiralty and had a huge stable complex with stalls and a saddling area the size of any which could be seen at the best horse trainer’s yard. The area had been converted into small demonstration rooms. The hypnotist and his acolytes and the subject all arrived at the same time. My colleague and I were standing talking in the yard when we saw the hypnotist walking towards us with a group surrounding him, and in the distance was the man whom we had heard could be hypnotised at long range. As Arthur Askey of Radio, film and TV fame used to say, ‘Before our very eyes’, and so it was, the hypnotist clapped his hands, the man in the distance stopped and seemed to become trance-like, another clap and he was on his way as if nothing had happened. It was frightening.

Apparently we were not the only ones to have seen the demonstration. We heard that next day the two men, the hypnotist and his main subject left the camp. What happened to them was never divulged, but the Navy was no place for a man with those skills who used them for his own aggrandisement with such irresponsibility and inhumanity. I have been left with the conviction that hypnotism is never a plaything to be used just to amuse, amaze and titillate.

Schooling In Britain 1930

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Returning to a British school in 1930 seemed totally alien from what I had experienced in Africa. The hours were different, I had to walk over a mile each way to school, morning and afternoon and the classes were bigger. When I arrived we worked with rooms lighted by gaslight in winter afternoons and, worst of all, I was out of my depth through losing two whole years of schooling. I sat next to a boy who constantly wet himself and there was a permanent aroma. We were not allowed to change seats because it saved the teacher calling the roll twice a day, as we sat in alphabetical order – unfortunately. I remember one teacher who had come from New Zealand and who seemed only to teach Maori customs. She had us making endless native huts and constantly drawing maps of the place.

There was a strong amateur dramatic interest in the school with end of term plays and it was about this time that I learned sword dancing. The swords were made in the school woodwork shop, where the woodwork master was not averse to throwing bad work at the head of the poor incompetent who had made it, and he rarely missed. The dance called for eight participants and as we danced round we put the swords to our shoulders, and with a good deal of pushing and wrestling, twisting and turning, we managed to get the swords locked together to form an octagon, rather like a large Jewish Star. The whole shape was held in the air by one sword, by the team leader; when it was lowered the swords were withdrawn with a flourish, clashed together high in the centre, like the thin spire of a church and then the dance continued. We gave exhibitions, why I never quite understood, because it was a very dull dance, every bit as dull as Morris Dancing, especially as we were too young to get well oiled before we started. I suppose that was the main difference. I also became re-acquainted with discipline. (See Sex & Child Abuse) Nowadays young people seem to think for themselves more than we did, they are more cynical and less malleable, or do I imagine that?

Believe it or not, it was an honour to be ink monitor. Can one think of any greater example of brain washing than to make a child actually want to go to school earlier on Monday morning and stay later on Friday afternoon than his compatriots, get his hands filthy dirty with an almost permanent stain and perhaps ruin a perfectly good shirt into the bargain, while he washes out a whole boxful of grungy, chipped, china inkwells of their coagulated mess, then mixes the astringent smelling powder and finally refills them. Not content with that he has to carry the trayful up several flights of stairs and place two in each desk with the inevitable spillage and further chore of cleaning up, all the time worried in case this great honour is taken from him.

There were the art classes where the inept were cheek-by-jowl with the insouciant, and plagued by the competent who always came just when things were going wrong, with words like ‘Isn’t that nice,’ said with all the insincerity of a street pedlar, hurriedly followed by an entreating ‘Come and see mine’, a plea for praise and perhaps a statement of insecurity. It was strange that in a school where none were undernourished, why the licence to have biscuits and hot Bovril after a swim in the swimming bath of a neighbouring school, was such a great inducement that few, if any, brought notes of excuse. That was the era of cigarette cards. No one failed to collect them, but some collected them for a strange game like a coconut shy. The boys had areas along the playground wall marked out rather like the Oche for darts. Against the wall were propped cigarette cards at intervals and the players would stand at different lines, depending on the distance from the wall, and by flicking a card of their own, from between their fingers, they had to try to fell a cigarette card leaning against the wall. If successful, one received a number of cards equivalent to the offer for each line, say two, three or even ten if it was a back line. There were tricks of course. The stall holders would bend the cards slightly so they arched away from the wall and were thus stiffer to hit. The throwers, – or I suppose, the suckers – would use stiff cards because they flew better and harder and they also adopted a scything technique so they could fell more than one target card at a time, to the annoyance of the stall holder.There were no lollipop ladies; policemen were stationed at crossing points and held the hands of the smaller children as they crossed the traffic in flocks. The children vied for the favours of the policeman and most policemen reciprocated by giving the appearance of being interested in their stories.